There are two perfect times of year on this planet: the start of baseball season, and the end of baseball season. Endless miles of poetry have been written about spring training and the Fall Classic, aka the World Series. Not coincidentally, we tend to see spikes in MLB betting activity for Opening Day and the postseason – especially the latter, with increased intensity as we get closer to crowning a new champion.
There are also two tribes when it comes to baseball betting: those who stick to advanced baseball stats and projections in search of bargains on the MLB odds board, and those who practice the dark arts of “fading the public.” A tasty blend of both is ideal if you want to maximize your profits, but when the playoffs arrive and those casual bettors hit the marketplace, your focus should naturally shift towards scooping up as much of their money as they’ll give you. Here’s how.
The Postseason picture as we enter the final week of the regular season ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/hb0iI7oUbO
— MLB Network (@MLBNetwork) September 23, 2024
1. Use Advanced Stats As a Baseline
Before we get into those dark arts, we need to remember what “sharp” sports betting is all about: Doing a superior job of evaluating wagers and their profitability, as compared to your fellow bettors in the marketplace. They are your competition, not the online sportsbooks.
When you’re scoping out the betting opportunities on the MLB odds board, you should of course be evaluating the teams themselves, but you also have to pay attention to the betting patterns surrounding said teams – or players, if you’re betting on MLB player props.
How much weight should you devote to each side? It’s not quite as easy as putting together the recipe for a delicious hamburger, where you can’t go wrong with 80/20 ground chuck for your fat ratio. But we can say this much: Start with doing a better job of analyzing the teams and players, especially if you’re new to betting on baseball.
You’ve read Moneyball, right? Or at least you’ve seen the movie? We’re all a bit smarter than we were 20 years ago, I hope, but the concept remains the same: Some stats do a better job of describing team and player performance than others. Wins and losses are the most important numbers in baseball, but you’ll evaluate teams more accurately by looking instead, for example, at run differentials – runs scored minus runs allowed – over the course of the regular season.
As for those player props, the hot thing in the mid-aughts was to look at on-base percentage (OBP) instead of batting average, which doesn’t properly take the value of walks into account. Then it was OPS, or On-base Plus Slugging percentage. I still use OPS a lot in my baseball picks, but the big kahuna these days is Weighted Runs Created Plus, or wRC+. You can find most of these important numbers for both hitters and pitchers (and fielders, although those stats are shakier) on FanGraphs and/or Baseball Reference, although those dreaded paywalls keep closing in, little by little.
2. Find Spots to Fade the Public
Now that you’ve done your homework on the teams and players, it’s time to look at those other bettors in the marketplace. Not all of them are wiseguys; many are “recreational” bettors who are just putting down a few bucks on their favorite clubs. Big-city teams with famous brand names (New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers) tend to draw more of these recreational bettors than teams from smaller markets (Tampa Bay Rays, Arizona Diamondbacks).
The bandwagon really fills up when teams are winning – especially as we get deeper into the playoffs. But as you may have noticed, the MLB postseason has become more of a crapshoot with every additional team they add to the format, up to a dozen now as of 2022. The Yankees and Dodgers have one World Series victory between them since 2010. Look at some of the teams who have won titles since then (World Series odds heading into Opening Day included):
- 2015: Kansas City Royals (+3300)
- 2019: Washington Nationals (+1600)
- 2023: Texas Rangers (+5000)
True, every once in a while you get a chalky club like the 2020 Dodgers (+385) or the 2009 Yankees (+500) winning the World Series. But you’re never going to score the big paydays with these public teams, and that public gets bigger and bigger with each passing round of the MLB postseason. Bet accordingly.
